ABSTRACT
In a 1982 paper John R. Ross suggests that languages may be classifi ed using Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) “hot-cool” division of the media. According to McLuhan, a medium is “hot” if the communication process involves little or no audience participation, and “cool” if active audience participation is required. A movie is thus a “hot” medium in that most of what it is intended to convey is presented before the viewer’s eyes, whereas the telephone is a “cool” medium in that the success of communication depends upon considerable participation by the hearer. Commercial TV programs may be relatively “hot” since communication requires relatively little effort on the part of the audience, but an Oriental painting or Russell’s An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth will be “cool” since full appreciation of their messages requires considerable effort on the part of the viewer or reader. Ross suggests that the same analogy may be extended to classifying languages on the basis of the explicitness with which they express certain anaphoric elements. For example, English may be said to be a “hot” language because pronouns cannot in general be omitted from grammatical sentences, and the information required to understand each sentence is largely obtainable from what is overtly seen and heard in it. On the other hand, Chinese may be said to be a very “cool” language in that such pronouns are usually omissible (and are often more naturally omitted) from grammatical sentences, and understanding a sentence requires some work on the reader’s or the hearer’s part, which may involve inference, context, and knowledge of the world, among other things. Other languages can be depicted as having a status somewhere between these two extremes, allowing more freedom than the “hot” languages, but less than the “cool” ones, for the use of empty or zero pronouns. For the sake of concreteness, let us look at a few examples in terms of this “hot-cool” descriptive parameter.
